Mark’s mind was still calculating the significance of the blindness as he dismembered the one that was tearing at the woman, getting his blade up under its diaphragm and destroying the flesh and circuitry there. In a moment, it dropped away, the eyes agonized, the body spitting smoke and blood.

The woman was severely injured, and her husband threw himself on her, crying out in the abandon of his grief, cradling her, seeking to stop her bleeding and give what comfort he could. Other hybrids began crowding toward them, attracted by the sound.

Mark leaped the forty feet into the rafters of the structure, looking down now on the clustering hybrids.

“Hey,” he called, “up here!”

As every head snapped toward him, he jumped through the iron rafters, making sure his boots clanged. “Here I am,” he called, and all the heads once again turned.

Then he saw that Gina was wading into the confusion of the hybrids below, and he dropped back down to give her support, crushing the skulls of two of them with his boots as he landed.

Within seconds, he and Gina were back-to-back. He cut and thrust, pushing his blade in past the plates of chitinous underskin armor that protected the hybrids’ vitals. They had been designed so that they carried their armor in their bodies.

His thoughts slowed his movements slightly, and one of them immediately leaped onto his back. He reached around and ripped it off, listening to its hissing mechanical scream, assessing from the sound if it was wounded or whole.

Hearing that it was in pain, he knew that it would be slow and so used a bullet to fire into its mouth. It threw back its head, but not quite fast enough.

Then he saw a shape nearby, a reeling, seething blackness. For a moment, he was confused. But then he understood that it was a person covered by something he had not seen before—insects—and then he saw a flashing arm, and the covered person ripped some of them away, and he saw Gina.

When he reached her, he tore at the things, levering into them with his knife and cracking them like crabs.

“Thank you for noticing,” she said, her tone sarcastic. She returned to battle with her knife.

It ended so abruptly that Mark lurched as his knife cut air instead of the creature he had expected to connect with.

“What happened?” Gina asked.

“No idea. They—” He touched one of them with his foot. “It’s like a plug got pulled. They must’ve been taking too much damage.”

“Okay, folks,” Gina called. “We want you to show yourselves now. The danger may not be over here, but you have a breather. We’re going out after them.”

“Unless it’s another trap,” Mark muttered.

One by one, they appeared, a bedraggled, trembling clutch of humanity, their eyes at once dull with shock and touched by gleams of hope.